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Gillian Tett

lines on the record: 74
first: 2023-11-01
most recent: 2023-11-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And by the way, I should say, by the way, if the Japanese would prefer a robot to an immigrant, I should stress, by the way, that they're certainly not alone in that. If you look at the tenor of the debate in the UK or the US from parts of the political spectrum, many of them would prefer a robot to an immigrant as well. And that's”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“betting is on the latter because Japan is the only country I know of where people love automation and robots and even the unions like them and they like them because the dirty secret that is at the moment I think many Japanese prefer a robot to an immigrant. To be honest, that's traditionally been, but Japan had Astro Boy, which was this comic skit that mattered enormously 20, 30 years ago, which put very positive image of robots, whereas in the UK we had 2001 AD instead. We had Doctor Who and Daleks, you know, so we're all programmed to fear robots. In Japan, they're all raised to love them because it's Astro Boy. But that's where the cultural factors start to really play into concepts of productivity and economies going forward. And why I think anthropology and economics needs to be blended.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For any economic projections going forward. And to understand that, you just have to look like a country like Japan, which has basically seen an explosive increase in female labor force participation in the last 15, 20 years. And the way that was unimaginable when I was in Japan, when it was taken for granted that Japanese women would ever work on mass. And so one of the reasons why Japan has managed to keep growing, in spite of its absolutely appalling demographics, is because more women are entering the workforce. To my mind, the really interesting question going forward, which matters for China, is what happens next because they can't grow the female workforce that much more. Maybe they can raise the retirement age. But the question, to my mind that's really interesting, is will the massive cultural barrier towards immigration drop in Japan because of that, or will they adopt robots massively to compensate instead?”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's fascinating is that COVID suddenly tossed us back into the way that most of humanity looks at the world and we all became the 21st equivalent of peasant farmers in the sense that we all started working at home and the boundaries between home and work blurred and the boundaries between our family and our work colleagues really blurred because all our kids joined our Zoom calls and our sense of when we worked changed because actually we stopped working nine to five if we'd ever done that. I mean any single mother has always known nine to five was a complete joke. We always working at you know you'd always tell who's a single mother by getting the emails at 2 o'clock in the morning but you know the whole concept for the workday and our boundaries shifted and became incredibly flexible and increasingly the idea of retiring at 65 is breaking down as well and all of that really mattered”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's become totally normalized for anyone who grew up in that world and has become baked into a lot of the way that economic models were in the past. Now, one obvious problem with that is that it's never been like the case entirely. We've always had the gray economy, the black economy. We've always had people doing unpaid work like homework or housework that wasn't included, et cetera, et cetera. But the other issue is actually for 99.9% of humanity You know, if you look back at human history, that was a really weird way to look at the world.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, I find this fascinating because this is the area where I think that, you know, I've deliberately not given you a sort of evangelical reason as to why you should all become anthropologists, but I do happen to believe that. Or more to the point, I believe, if any of you have kids who want to become anthropologists instead of accountants don't despair because they can get jobs. Demographics is one area where looking beyond the raw numbers is absolutely critical and looking at culture and how that impacts how economies develop. Because what's happened in the last 50 years in the West is we've become accustomed to the idea that actually our working life is from 18 to 65 and then it stops and we retire. We become accustomed to the idea that we work”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a basic mathematical way, given current technology, absolutely yes, and during COVID, guess what? Carbon emissions for the first time for a very long time actually slowed down. So yes, obviously, from the point of view of millions of people's lives, if you actually were to do a poll and ask them, they'd say almost certainly not. And if we don't have more technological breakthroughs and more decarbonization technology, then that's going to become an increasingly real debate going forward. But we're not there right now, I don't think. But yes, I do hear you on that one. In terms of the other one, the...”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With their ability to have strategic medium to long-term planning in a way that's so conspicuously and lamentably absent in the UK or the US.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone had parted it and published it, and it became a bestseller, apparently, which is nice. But I had a stream of Chinese officials coming to see me later on and asking me how they could avoid the trap of Japan. And they were acutely aware of the similarities of the two. And I think they're just playing out right now in a very similar kind of way. And so demographics are problematic. The debt is problematic, very problematic. If they slip into deflation, it will get much worse. They haven't yet. And also, the other problem is that so much of their growth has been powered by exports. And if we are heading towards more fragmented world, that's going to be harder. However, having said all that, I still stand in awe of the degree to which the Chinese government has managed to dance their way around all kinds of problems to date, extraordinarily well. And I also stand in awe.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of the China question, China's had an economic miracle for two or three decades. Almost impossible to see how that will be sustained, partly because of demographics, partly because of the Debt Mountain and the rising financial strains in the system, which look unbelievably Japanese to me. And in fact, I lived in Japan in the 1990s during their debt crisis. My first book was about Japan. and about how they went so badly wrong. And after the book was published, I was then told six months later that it had become a bestseller in China, which was a surprise that I'd never actually sold the rights to China.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was absolutely central to how Britain got out of its debts post-World War II. People think somehow we magically grew bologna. Half of the debt reduction was due to a financial repression. And the beauty of financial repression is that no one understands it. So if your Rishi Sunak or the next government is a wonderful tool to use because you carry it on very stealthily for a long time. And that's another kind of quasi-default, if you like. The downside of financial repression or the difficulties with it right now is that they could do it after World War II and they did it in America as well because central banks controlled the main metrics of financial markets and they had for the most part export controls on the currency. You don't have that today and you have the internet. So it could actually be a lot harder to implement. But I think that's probably the future in some form.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's just below the prevailing market rate on bonds. And essentially what that means is you have slightly negative real rates over a number of years. And if you maintain that situation for a long time, what it means is essentially debt will fall because taxpayers or anyone owning the bond is paying a small subsidy each year to the government in a way that's so subtle and hard to understand that no one no one really notices or complains about.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do I think that's going to happen in the US anytime soon unless we have more debt crises with the Republican body and Democrats failing to agree on debt ceilings and stuff like that? Probably not. But you'd also default by not paying your pension promises or downgrading them. That is extremely likely, if not almost certain. You can also default by essentially indirectly having, if not inflation, then having something which economists call financial repression. And for those of you who don't know what financial repression is and care about this stuff, I'd say go out immediately and look up it on the internet. And in particular, look up some of the papers that came out in 2008 on this. Because what financial oppression is, is a situation where essentially governments engineer a rate of interest.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow, small questions. On the issue of debt, Is a default Likely, in the medium to long term, absolutely yes, but it depends on your definition of default because there are several ways you can default. You can simply not pay your loans back in an overt default, or you can default in your bonds as countries like Argentina do every five minutes.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“year. That's a four to five fold increase in where we were three years ago. And it's more than is being invested in fossil fuels, thank God. And you have that much money being thrown at a problem. It's hard not to think that there's going to be not be some kind of breakthrough in the coming years. I don't want to stress that because there's a bunch of Silicon Valley bros who hope for a magic wand emanating from a company that they own, who will somehow get us out of having to make sacrifices or hard choices. And there is that magical thinking that happens, particularly on the West Coast. But I do think that would be the other big tech breakthrough that could happen.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other than AI. I guess the one that I would point to is a breakout innovation on the clean energy and renewable energy side. We've already had a lot of innovations on that front. It's been quite remarkable. We already have all the technology we need technically to get us to net zero if only we deploy it. But, you know, there's an awful lot of research going on right now into fission, fusion, clean aviation fuel, all of those things. And if one of those batteries, batteries, batteries right now are the holy grail above all else. And if somebody has a massive breakthrough in batteries in a way that would mean either we could really break our dependence on fossil fuels much faster than we expected or bring down the cost of energy dramatically, that would actually have quite a big impact, a very positive impact on how the world's developing. It's worth remembering that the IEA reckons there's going to be $1.8 trillion worth of renewable energy investment.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“is a small modest switch away from the dollar as particularly south to south trade starts to get invoiced on occasion in other currencies particularly the Chinese renminbi but again it's very slow and very small and there's this concept of dollar stickiness which is once you've started invoicing in one currency it's quite hard to shift which again doesn't hasn't changed a lot But what you are getting is it growing attempts to try and break the dollar and whether it's through the Chinese saying they want to build up their currency markets, which doesn't look like it's going to happen soon because of the problems in the Chinese financial system, whether it's because you've got the Russians trying to create an alternative to the payments messaging processing that dominates in the West. Again, I won't get too technical about this, or whether it's through the central bank digital currencies, there's definitely rising interest in finding ways around”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's still very difficult to trade without the dollar. And if you look at the usage of dollar internationally, and there are several key metrics, one is central bank reserves. And on that metric, actually there is sign of diversification amongst some countries away from the dollar. So Russia and China, unsurprisingly, have diversified a lot. A lot of the non-Western countries are diversifying. But not dramatically, but they are diversified. If you look at the capital markets, where people actually raising money and trading, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the dollar has lost its preeminent role. And that's because there isn't really a depth of single European debt to make the Eurozone really vibrant. If you look at trade invoicing, i.e. what do you actually use when you sell goods,”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the case of Ukraine's Russians' invasion of Ukraine, I think that actually was an overwhelming moral case for sanctions. They haven't worked particularly well because there's been a lot of sanction dodging by third countries. Greek ship owners should hang their heads in shame for how they were transporting oil, even as the EU was trying to clamp down on that. And they've now sold a whole bunch of their ships to the Russians, which is just as bad. But I do think sanctions have helped some of the signaling. And I do think that they remain a tool that needs to be used on occasion. The problem, though, is that if the world is splitting into a Cold War order and if the dollar is being challenged, which is not yet, but if it does get more challenged, they'll get harder to implement going forward.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, kudos to the ECLIS profession for taking on board the environment, trying to grapple with difficult questions like what happens if you try and measure the impact of all our free services on the internet into consumption, things like that. So the economists know that things need to change. Not enough of them are moving fast enough to do that. But the IMF, for example, now spends a huge amount of time thinking about nontraditional issues as well. So it's happening, but not fast enough. And in terms of sanctions, Goodness, huge, huge, huge issue. The reality is that in the past, sanctions have sometimes worked.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, behavior economics is traditionally, not traditionally, until 2005, much of economics is predicated on the idea of rational man or rational person who behaved like a robot and was consistent and rational and had perfect economic knowledge, which is clearly baloney. And obviously psychology and culture and sociology and anthropology affects how economies behave. You know, it's like it's so obvious you feel like going duh. But that was kind of very much ignored previously. Behavioral finance makes it very obvious but often no point that you need to look at how humans actually behave and their cognitive processes to understand how markets work and how economies work. And that's really risen since 2007. So that's good.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm being critical of the Acclites profession in the past, particularly in the run-up to 2007. I give them huge credit for embracing behavioral finance in parts of the economic profession and for increasingly widening their lens.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm told that Munichi would come back. Who knows? But a number of the people who were there last I won't come back. And the third reason why it's so alarming is because if he does come back this time around, he's coming back into a world which is much more dangerous geopolitically and where many of the people that Trump have cuddled up to in the past appear hell-bent on wrecking damage on the West and where there's already a huge amount of turbulence and how NATO and Europe respond will be very interesting to see, but I know that there is an enormous amount of scenario planning going on right now, not just amongst the European government and kind of break glass in case of emergency policies, but also, frankly, amongst parts of the American intelligence and security apparatus about how to protect things in the future.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grown up, so you had on the military side a bunch of really very deeply committed public servants who were determined to keep the show on the road no matter what. And I knew a number of them pretty well and really did their very best to keep the show on the road. And you also had people who'd come from Wall Street who knew how to add up and were in charge of the economy and stuff like that. And you had Steve Mnuchin, who probably was the least likely Treasury Secretary in the history of Treasury Secretaries, but also knew how to add up and turned out to be actually a very savvy operator. And Trump basically gave Manu Chin pretty much free range to do whatever he want in all the areas that kind of bored Trump and he wasn't interested in. And those areas were basically the CFDC, the SEC, the Fed and the Treasury Department. So that was pretty much ring-fenced from what Trump was interested in.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think there really would be a wholesale gutting of many parts of the bureaucracy. And that's very alarming. Secondly, I think that you will get a number of the people who served in the last administration will not return. And by that I mean when Trump came in last time, you know, there were crazies with him, but there were also people who, even if you didn't agree with their politics, had enough experience to be pretty credible.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if there was an election tomorrow, it's basically 50 50 as to who would win because if Joe Biden's running, I personally think he's a pretty bad candidate. Others disagree and I'm not in any way attacking his record to date, which I think has been very impressive, but I don't think he's a particularly impressive candidate for the next four years. So if they're running today, it probably would be 50-50. And that's what the polls show. But there's so much to play for between now and then. It's almost meaningless to make these predictions and possibilities. But what if Trump comes in, I think it could be a lot worse than first time, because firstly, Trump will be hellbound on revenge. He's already his team have comb True in great detail the Constitution to find clauses that would allow them to fire bureaucrats who have stood up to them in the past or disagreed with them.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, by a happy coincidence, I was with Kevin Hassett last week, who was a former chief economic advisor under Trump. And he and I had a rather strong difference in views over this issue. First point to make is that a second Trump presidency is entirely possible. Barring a legal development, is it possible that the courts will not trump out? Entirely possible. But if they don't, it's really quite likely that he will end up being the Republican candidate.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if the world outside moves faster than you can reorganize your bureaucracy, then your silos inside an organization are out of kilter with what's actually needed in terms of the challenges. So to give an example that you asked about to do with AI, right now there's a really big problem in finance in that AI potentially will transform many aspects of finance. It's changing things very fast. Right now, AI, if it's regulated at all, is regulated by IT regulators, not by central banks. And you have a silo problem again and they can't communicate and they're not reorganizing themselves fast enough to keep up with the world outside the institution.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that changing in a nutshell? Not really. In some fields, yes, but not really, not fast enough. There are two aspects of that that worry me right now. One is that given the illusion that the internet would break down silos, and it can do brilliantly if we mindfully use it for that purpose. But what happens when people go online most of the time is that they get stuck into cyber tribes and they become more tribal, not less tribal than they do in real life. The other thing that worries me is that the problem with creating silos is that people create silos based on a situation that exists at one moment in time. So you might say we need to deal with banking right now because the banks are blowing up. Let's create a silo of banking regulators on top of banks.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the way, I should say many of the billionaires I've spoken to are also deeply concerned about this. And he thinks actually there's a risk of rising risk of civil war inside America. Now, he could be wrong, but it's certainly a very interesting straw on the wind. In terms of silos, I mean, I wrote a book, my second to last book was called The Silo Effect about how”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He thinks there's a trade war, a tech war, a cyber war, a capital war, and a shooting war, what I call slightly cynically TTCCS. And if you look at US-China right now, US-China are already gone through the trade war, the tech war, the cyber war. They're flirting with the capital war aspect too. And thank God they haven't gone to a shooting war. So it's important to say to be clear about what you mean when you say war. But his point is that the rods are rising and it's alarming. The other thing that's very interesting though about Ray in some ways a more interesting thing is that he thinks that the US is so ridden by social conflict because of income inequality. You might say that's kind of ironic coming from billionaire, but there we go. But he as a billionaire is deeply concerned about rising income inequality.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is fascinating about Radalio is that in the last decade, he has perhaps more than anybody else dramatically swerved. And these days, what he spends as much time looking at is non-quantitative issues, looking at history and culture and sociology, and they're hiring teams of people to look at all these slippery stuff outside the models. And that analysis has really led him to make two important conclusions. One is that he thinks that there is a rising chance of a global war and that he now, in fact, says of the 50% probability of a global hot war up from 35% to years ago. I mean, how the hell he gets these probabilities, who knows? But the point is it's rising. The first point to make, which is scary. However, it's really important to stress that his definition of war comes in five parts.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, all right, two massive questions. Right, so let me translate both of those for the wider audience. Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater, a massive hedge fund that has been very successful for many parts of its existence. He, to my mind, is a fascinating bellwether of how things are changing because when I first met Ray in 2008, He had done a truly brilliant job of forecasting the financial crisis by looking very, very geekily at capital flows and inflation and debt and all the things that economists are used to studying incessantly. And so he was basically a paid up model man who looked at all the economic numbers and had done brilliantly well. Now,”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they'd only ever lived in a world where progress seemed to be going in one direction. And in some ways what's happened in the last couple of years is that the West has simply caught up where the rest of humanity's been for a very long time.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it collapsed, and almost overnight Tajikistan went backwards in history in almost every possible way, to take the simplest way, the marriage age for girls went from being really quite high to collapsing almost overnight. That for me showed me two things. Firstly, history can go backwards sometimes and systems that seem very robust on the outside can sometimes be much more fragile than you realize. And the only thing that was more shocking than that experience was coming back to the West later and realizing that my way that I looked at events and systems and structures, which by the way is the same way that anyone who lived in the former Soviet Union also instinctively has embedded in their hearts or someone who's lived in the Middle East, by the way, realizing that the vast majority of people I met in England and America did not have that view at all.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I'm actually one of those people who doesn't believe or has never thought for many years that history only went in one direction because I did my PhD as an anthropologist in the former Soviet Union. And I did my work actually then when it was still the Soviet Union. And my entire PhD was predicated on the assumption that the Soviet Union would continue because my entire PhD topic was looking at the interaction between the Soviet system and in my case Tajik village systems in Tajikistan. So that was my whole PhD program. It never occurred to me in 1989 the Soviet Union would collapse. It didn't occur to anyone I knew who was living and I was living amongst in my PhD program.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes and no. I have made numerous mistakes over the years. Not believe that Brexit vote would go the way it did, and that was my own ignorance and laziness and lack of my one-on-one anthropology in terms of trying to think myself into the mentality of people who were different from me. And that was a real wake-up call to me. So I was surprised by that. And yes, on one level, I have been surprised by all saddened, deeply saddened, by the crumbling of that holy trinity that I joke about. Because the reality is I happen to personally believe that free markets and globalization and democracy are very good things.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Globalization Index, which are basically movement of people, goods, money, and ideas. Collectively, they haven't gone into any significant reverse, but they've slowed down. You know, even the internet, the movement of ideas is coming under attack because of the rise of the splinternet and the system there. So you're seeing localization come up in its place, but it's not nearly as dramatic as the headlines would suggest. And in some areas, globalization is still alive and well, particularly the movement of ideas. And that's actually sparking more crises and solving them right now.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they started intervening yet again in all kinds of energy markets. And the cumulative effect of that is that the idea of government intervention has become normalized in a way that was unimaginable three decades ago. And so even in America, which likes to say it's a land of the free or free markets, you now have bi-dynamics and open discussion of industrial policy that is embraced not just by the left, but by the right as well in the interest of national security. So you really have a leap backwards to a kind of almost wartime footing mentality in how people are talking about the economy. And on globalization, again, you've had this fragmentation, not just in terms of protectionism exploding. You had financial fragmentation after 2007. But if you look at the four measures of globalization, which the DHL index tracks, which is a main...”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would self evidently keep spreading across the world and that history basically went in one direction in the direction of progress. And what's happened since 2007 is that all three of those have cumulatively come under attack. So democracy is obvious what's happened there. The Bertelsmann does an amazing survey which shows each year how many countries are democratic or not democratic and for the first time ever since 2004 the index now has more autocracies and democracies across the world in terms of free market economics starting in 2007-8 governments intervened massively in the financial sector then they intervened in money markets and the financial system drew quantitative easing then with COVID they intervened all over the place with healthcare systems and everything else and supply chains”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that basically there's a wider cognitive going on. I went to the World Economic Forum in Davos for the first time in 2007. And I joked back then that Davos man, and it was 81% Davos man, you know, 90% Davos woman at the time, was basically driven by a sort of, again, this is my anthropology background. They had an intellectual framework and, you know, a cognitive map, which was basically driven by three core ideas that they took for granted so thoroughly they never even bothered to state them really or question them. This was the Holy Trinity of the Davos religion, if you like. And one of them was globalization. One was free market economics and one was democracy. And Davos Man assumed that all three were self-evidently good and that all three”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, my vice is this it's very simple. I'm not saying throw your models away. I'm not saying throw your balance sheet away. You know, if you're walking through a dark wood at night with a compass, you do not want to throw away your compass. But if you walk through a dark wood at night and you just stare at the compass dial looking down all the time, then you're going to walk into a tree, even if you're going in the right direction. And right now, if you're using your models, your balance sheets, or even frankly your opinion polls, and you're not looking up around you at all the stuff that's been left out of the model, then you're going to end up with nasty shocks.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was normal to create this lovely economic model telling you exactly what's going to happen. And it was a normal for the IMF to come up with these forecasts that the media all faithfully reported as if that was gospel. That's not normal by the standards of human history. And humans have always found ways to thrive and prosper in very volatile uncertain times. But for this generation, our generation that are used to treating our models as compasses that were pretty much infallible has come as a big shock.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All growth upwards in stocks, and if anything causes faith in those big tech companies to crumble, that would be pretty devastating for the stock market as a whole. But it's not just stock market volatility, it's volatility in inflation, prices going up and down, it's volatility in politics, it's volatility in environmental events, it's volatility in geopolitics. And we're dealing with extreme uncertainty on many, many fields. And in some ways, that is not unusual because if you widen the lens beyond the last 50 years when most of us grew up, you know, extreme volatility and uncertainty was kind of the normal human condition much of the time. It's kind of a conceit that in the last 40, 50 years, we came to assume that it was normal to plan forward for 100 years and price a bond off of a 100-year horizon.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Key challenge basically is the range of outcomes in the next two or three years, to put it crudely, in that we're dealing with volatility in every possible sense. It's not just, you know, normally when people say volatility, what they mean is some weird part of the financial markets has a price that's going up and down very dramatically. And everyone normal can ignore that. Today, volatility means, yes, financial markets are incredibly volatile. For those of you in finance, what's happened in the Treasury's market, which is supposed to be Dull's ditch water and really boring and stable, is hugely volatile and pretty shocking. I fully expect equity markets to be hyper volatile. One of the things that's happened in the stock market in the US in the last few years is that the so-called Big Seven, which are tech companies, have come to dominate everything and they're driving almost”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Designing social media apps, he's now produced a fantastic video that explains what's going on in AI and why some of it's quite so dangerous. The thing I would stress though is I'm not in the camp of people who say it's all demon disaster at all because just being in kings in Cambridge in the last three weeks, I mean, it is stunning what AI is doing for research in terms of biological research. I mean, absolutely unimaginable leaps in research capabilities in terms of neuroscience, in terms of biology, in terms of engineering. I mean, the way that people at Cambridge, and I'm dare say the other universities as well, are using AI tools for positive research benefits right now would blow your mind. So that's a good side. We have to find out a way to harness that in a positive way.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Idea. You could very easily apply that to the AI sector and say you can't counterfeit humans. You can't create fake bots or you will go to jail. You don't need new laws. You just take the ones from the financial world and apply them into the tech sector. You could use issues around watermarking and require content to be watermarked. They've talked about that already and I think probably next week they'll come out with something on that to mean that people can check whether the provenance is real or not. So the things you can do around all of that quite immediately, which would be an ease progress. But the big question is how are you going to stop the incipient capabilities that are emerging? So aside from Jeff Hinton's video, Tristan Harris, who is one of the West Coast techies who has spent the last decade warning about social media, he was previously at Google.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, if any of you have got time with your hands to spare, I want to understand this. Jeff Hinton gave a brilliant interview at King's actually on this issue where he expressed his concerns, not just about the bigger existential risks that the machines might go mad and take over the world and kill us all, but actually the very immediate risks that in the 2024 election we may have an absolute proliferation of deep fakes and manipulation that way. And that's going to be a topic for discussion next week in Bletchley Park. And there are things you can do about that. I mean, I was with the UVA al-Haruri today, the author of sapiens, you know, who comes out with some really good, sensible ideas like, you know, you could use a lot of existing legislation to try and control AI, counterfeiting. That's really well established in the financial sphere. You can't counterfeit money. You could very easily, and this is Hariri's UVA.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. Do I trust the AI companies themselves that regulate it? Probably no, not either. But it's going to need some kind of regulation and control going forward because if not, that's quite scary.”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the way, their salaries are going up through the roof right now of the bridging. And there's really only four companies that are driving the base systems, not the applications, but the base systems. And that means that those people understand it and almost nobody else does. There's a huge gap in understanding. And there's almost no one in Congress who has a foggiest idea how these systems really work. Congress in 2016 had more talk show radio hosts than it had scientists in Congress. True fact. And scientists in America were so horrified by that fact that they actually went out and created a political action group to recruit more scientists to get involved in politics. To my knowledge, the UK doesn't even have a political action group, and I don't know how many scientists there are in the House of Parliament, but I bet my bottom dollar there aren't that many. That's a problem. So do I trust governments to regulate it?”
2023-11-01 · Intelligence Squared · Gillian Tett on the Year Ahead · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT